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RE: Translating character entities for plain text output
- From: "Michael Kay" <michael dot h dot kay at ntlworld dot com>
- To: <xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com>
- Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 19:14:19 +0100
- Subject: RE: [xsl] Translating character entities for plain text output
- Reply-to: xsl-list at lists dot mulberrytech dot com
> I've found a lot of discussion in the archives about solving
> character entity problems for HTML output, but not much on plain text:
>
> Generating plain text from docbook via XSLT, I need to output
What do you mean by "plain text"? Specifically, what character encoding?
If you live in the US or Western Europe, chances are you want
iso-8859-1: so specify encoding="iso-8859-1" in the xsl:output
declaration.
> a space for and -- for —. I can get some funny
> glyphs (like  for ) and various literal codes, but not
> the result I want. I could postprocess the output, but I'd
> love to fix the style sheet.
Yes, you can do these conversions either in the stylesheet or by
postprocessing. Or if you want to be clever, you could do it at input
time: change the entity definitions so that means " " and —
means "--".
XSLT outputs bytes, not glyphs. The  glyph for was created by
the software you used to view the bytes. In this case the XSLT processor
was outputting a UTF-8 encoding of the character, and you were viewing
it using software that thought it was looking at iso-8859-1.
>
> In the stylesheet, I've tried defining the entity in a local
> subset
It's irrelevant how the stylesheet defines the entity, the XML parser
looks ofr the entity definitions in the source document.
, also html and text methods and various encodings in
> the xsl:output. The following almost works:
>
> <xsl:template match="text()">
> <xsl:if test="contains(.,' ')">
> <xsl:value-of select="translate(., ' ', ' ')"/>
> </xsl:if>
> </xsl:template>
>
> Unfortunately, this seems to suppress another essential
> translation on the same context:
>
> <xsl:value-of select="translate(., '

', ' ')"/>
>
> I can do either, but not both.
You can do both by writing translate(., ' 

', ' ')
But actually, there probably won't be any 
 characters in your
source: they are removed by the XML parser. Your translation works by
accident, I suspect, because it converts an 
 to a space and an 
to nothing.
Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@ntlworld.com
work: Michael.Kay@softwareag.com
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